Expression on the Corporate Web: 2018 Year in Review

Expression on the Corporate Web: 2018 Year in Review

If 2017 was the year that corporate platforms were finally forced to recognize their outsized role on the Web, then 2018 should be remembered as the year that many such platforms began to reckon with it. From Facebook finally instituting an appeals process to Tumblr banning adult content, here are some of the ways that corporate platforms tried to take responsibility...with mixed results for freedom of expression.

Sex takes a hit at Tumblr, Facebook, and YouTube

The passing of SESTA/FOSTA in early 2018 ushered in a new threat to free expression online, and pushed companies to take sweeping action against certain speech. Although not every instance of policy changes can be directly attributed to the law, it’s hard not to see its influence. From Tumblr’s early December to Facebook’s blunt new policy on sexual solicitation, it’s clear that we’re seeing a chilling effect.

In mid-December, Twitter proferred a holiday gift to users in the form of an expanded transparency report that includes a section on the company’s Rules enforcement. The report shows the number of accounts upon which various enforcement actions were taken across six categories of speech, a solid step in the right direction for transparency. Unfortunately, the company’s transparency report also showed an 80% increase in global legal demands for content takedowns, impacting more than twice as many accounts as the previous reporting period.

What’s yet to come…

2018 marked the inaugural year of our Who Has Your Back? Censorship Edition, in which we rated sixteen platforms across five categories. We look forward to seeing companies take more steps toward accountability and transparency in the new year!

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2018.

Related Updates

Today we are launching TOSsed Out, a new iteration of EFF’s longstanding work in tracking and documenting the ways that Terms of Service (TOS) and other speech moderating rules are unevenly and unthinkingly applied to people by online services. As a result of these practices, posts are deleted and...

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched TOSsed Out, a project to highlight the vast spectrum of people silenced by social media platforms that inconsistently and erroneously apply terms of service (TOS) rules.TOSsed Out will track and publicize the ways in which TOS and other speech moderation rules...

When social media platforms enforce their content moderation rules unfairly, it affects everyone’s ability to speak out online. Unfair and inconsistent online censorship magnifies existing power imbalances, giving people who already have the least power in society fewer places where they are allowed a voice online.President Donald Trump...

Social media platforms routinely make arbitrary and contradictory decisions about what speech to block or penalize. No one is happy with the status quo: not people who want more censorship, nor people who want less censorship, nor people who simply want platforms to make different choices so that already-marginalized groups...

Some of the most fruitful conversations we can have are about nuanced, sensitive, and political topics, and no matter who or where we are, the Internet has given us the space to do that. Across the world, an unrestricted Internet connection allows us to gather in online communities to talk...

EFF is deeply saddened and disturbed by the massacre in New Zealand. We offer our condolences to the survivors and families of victims.This horrific event had an online component; one gunman livestreamed the event, and it appears that he had an active and hateful online presence. Enforcing their terms of...

EFF and more than 100 civil society organizations across the globe wrote directly to Mark Zuckerberg recently demanding greater transparency and accountability for Facebook content moderation practices. A key step, we told Facebook, is implementation of a robust appeals process giving all users the power to challenge and...

Social media platform Tumblr has announced a ban on so-called “adult content,” a move made, it seems, in reaction to Tumblr’s app being removed from the Apple app store. But while making the app more available is in theory good for Tumblr users, in practice what’s about to happen...

The New York Times published a blockbuster story about Facebook that exposed how the company used so-called “smear merchants” to attack organizations critical of the platform. The story was shocking on a number of levels, revealing that Facebook’s hired guns stooped to dog-whistling, anti-Semitic attacks aimed at George...

We’ve taken Internet service companies and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to task for bad content moderation practices that remove speech and silence voices that deserve to be heard. We’ve catalogued their awful decisions. We’ve written about their ambiguous policies, inconsistent enforcement, and failure...